It's this slow unraveling, this
game of chicken, you look away first,
then I'll look away. My impossible
paper cut easy into shapes
that carry water up hills, and down,
hanging from sticks across
bone-vaulted sweat-shine,
breathe out sick now.

Your cold,
sore knees. Your impossible
stomach keeping you
awake where a corner of the moon,
a skintight pie wedge, uncovers
a flaw in the painted window
and illuminates the white of
your shot, shocked, open-lashed
eye.

Lesser

Ever unkempt in monsoon season,
with a smirk and a lean back,
and a right hand smoking Nazi
cock and left handed stories falling
down stairs into the color of
a bruised apple, cheekbones
cold, flushed from the wind
on the way home, followed,
bliss, to babydoll suffocation
and thinking it means something.

Cut back mild and semi-blind
break-necked out but baby
hangs around, not quite
nocturnal now is the
summer of our

the touch is too easy and all
I want is for you to keep me honest
what with overflow, loose-lipped
travesty of overwrought boredom,
innard bath.

I listen cause I say I wanna know
everything, blubbering haircut
staying near my old friend's brother's
high school fuck bunny
whose eyeliner really is impeccable.

I know you feel tall under the low ceiling,
steely eyed and toeless holding to the tilt
the floor up overhead discarded beer cans collect
in the rafters and rain down drops of cheap
dissatisfaction. It's a slaughter without regard,
decaying gratitude and undercooked
poorly lit one-drum town face pretty like.

Cynthia Spencer is the author of the poetry chapbook in what sequence will my parts exit (plumberries press, 2011). She is a founding member of the poetry collective Velvet in-Between and organizes the reading series Cloudburst in Milwaukee, WI.